Bank of the Dunajec in Sromowce

Stanisław Szygell was a continuator of the Polish school of landscape painting. As a student of Jan Stanislawski, he developed this type of painting throughout his life until the Second World War. He used synthetic shapes and pure colours to convey the feeling of nature in its universal and permanent principle.

Brzeg Dunajca (Dunajec Riverbank) belongs to this type of landscape studies, combining a thorough observation of nature and varied topography with a comprehensive, coherent approach to decorative shape. The painting depicts a swift brook framed by the curvature of the bank and a range of mountains closing the composition with a soft contour encompassing the ridge and tops. The painter transformed the perspective landscape into synthetic forms climbing up to the upper edge of the canvas, harmonised with alternating green and blue zones. The observed fragment of nature has been recreated by Szygell with seriousness and insight. At the same time, the synthetic language of forms that defines the representation is in the order of symbolic reproduction of nature as a book. Reading nature allows one to learn the eternal laws of changeability and permanence. The understanding of nature as an encrypted experience of the absolute conditioned an enduring tendency in turn-of-the-century painting. Szygell appears to be its continuator. Careful observation of the mountain landscape becomes an opportunity to express, by means of fluid forms and interpenetrating shapes, the metaphysical order as the order of painting.